If you'd like to be the new official maintainer, I'd be happy to know it has a new home

I can do that. Yeah, flite is very much suited for the empeg, but the fact that it doesn't handle the empeg's very specific audio format requirements is what caused us to need the ttsd/pcmplay shim initially. The new version apparently has an API that you can call directly from C programs, so that might help us out even more. I'll put the new version through its paces sometime soon.